Yeah, your setup looks more like what I’d expect the Spring Arm to do.
Aye, the character pawn in my game is maybe a little iffy. You see, the Pawn itself doesn’t have any actual geometry. It just has a position in the world; it has a Scene Component with attached to that a Spring Arm with a Camera. Then, its Player Controller spawns an Actor that whose behaviour is defined within that PC to always follow the mouse cursor position; this Actor additionally spawns a particle system that follows the mesh around. The hand mesh itself (with attached to it the particle system) have nothing to do with the player pawn, except that they are spawned by it. They do not collide with the Camera channels.
However, I did once code a MovementComponent for the pawn when trying to set up movement controls and following many different (conflicting) sources of information at once. Maybe I’ve messed something up in that step. I’ll try to recreate movement controls without the need for this MovementComponent. It seems irrelevant.